What Do You Stand For? What Do You Fall For?
| ai, politics | 1,223 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, politics, AI, generative AI, activism, Social Justice, free speech, labour, ethics
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/what-do-you-stand-for-what-do-you-fall-for/
Yesterday, I got an email from Jesse Lebron of Storible letting me know that over a third of all data centres and projected new hyperscale sites are "in high or extremely high water-stress areas." Arizona alone has 57 data centres in extremely water-stressed areas.
If you're a regular reader of mine, you know that I've written extensively about the ongoing harms of generative AI. And I've been talking to quite a few people who also share a negative personal view of genAI, but have told me that they're essentially forced to use it at their job or they'll be fired--that they are specifically tracked to ensure they meet a genAI quota. The CEO of Coinbase went on record saying any employee that didn't adopt AI tools was fired.
Let me give you a real-world example of this. Kim Crawley is a cybersecurity researcher whose work has been published by O'Reilly Media. She lost her livelihood because as a former OPIT professor, she refused to subject her MSc students to Gen AI. She is now running a Kickstarter for her next book, "Recovering After Gen AI," which I encourage you to check out.
But this isn't limited to generative AI. Civil and constitutional rights group Palestine Legal reported that between October and December 2023, it received 383 reports involving employment concerns, including 124 people who had already been fired, and described the wave of workplace repression as the most severe in the country since the Vietnam War. In the same year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations received 1,201 employment discrimination complaints related to Islamophobia, a 113 percent increase over 2022.
In April 2024, Google fired more than 50 workers after sit-in protests over Project Nimbus, its $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Google said that everyone it fired was personally involved in disrupting its offices, while the workers' group said some were bystanders who did not take part, including a fired Palestinian-American employee. That same month, nearly 300 current and former Apple employees signed an open letter accusing the company of punishing workers for wearing items like keffiyehs, and one former employee said she was fired from an Apple Store in Chicago for wearing one.
In June 2025, hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency employees signed a "Declaration of Dissent" criticizing the Trump administration's treatment of the agency's science and staff. About 140 of them were put on administrative leave, and in August the agency fired at least eight. The agency's own top ethics official reportedly concluded that signing the letter on personal time was no ethics concern and a protected exercise of the First Amendment. Employees at other agencies, including FEMA, signed similar letters of their own and were put on leave.
In July 2025, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York fired a social worker named Raizen after an anonymous complaint about a "Gaza Must Live" postcard in her office, which she said only her coworkers could see. More than 350 colleagues, patients, and other health care workers signed a petition protesting the firing.
How alarming is this to you? So many people are given the choice to either go against their own personal values and ethics, or to maintain them and lose their livelihood.
I don't blame people who comply--these are people who have families, with children who depend on them, who have their healthcare (and therefore, their lives) tied to their current position. We are forced to compartmentalize, forced to go along with whatever is chosen for us.
For some people, though, the option to ignore what's going on and bury their head in the sand is an intentional choice they make. I have seen people in the industry--white men--who have more authority, or a platform themselves, and have the opportunity to take a stance and stand with far fewer consequences for themselves.
And they do nothing.
I'll paraphrase a well-known quote and say that the harms proliferated throughout our world are far less due to a very small number of malicious people, but rather are due to the many good people who choose to do nothing and not act.
The winds of change are not carrying compassion and virtue. Liberal democracy continues to backslide, the four-week war with Iran is entering its seventh month, and the Pentagon is planning to livestream an execution.
You may be one of the people who has a comfortable status quo that has still not been shaken, and you may feel as though there is a level of misery or pearl-clutching when it comes to being vocal and taking a stand or being political at all. But let me tell you that I am vocal because I have a deep love for people and an undying relentless optimism that we can improve and do better. Thirty years on this planet witnessing cruelty has not been able to shake that, nor deter me in the slightest.
Caring about things and giving a fuck is not complaining, it is not being an insufferable keyboard warrior. It is the only act that will preserve what good we have and is the only chance we have of restoring the good we have already lost. I will never apologize for being annoying in how often I speak up about difficult things.
"Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be." ― James Baldwin
But it does not only have to be a very few people who choose to make personal sacrifice. I am not asking anyone to risk their family's healthcare to make a point. I am asking, though, for people who have the luxury to afford taking a stance to go first. Do you have a platform? A secure position and savings and a union? Skills that are easy to sell elsewhere? Then you have the least to lose by speaking up.
Do the little things. Sign the petition when a coworker is fired over a postcard, as 350 people did at Mount Sinai. Take the time and effort needed to join or organize a union, as workers can be fired for political speech if they're not in one. Put money toward people who lost income for refusing to compromise, like Kim Crawley's Kickstarter. Say the true thing when it is awkward and unpopular to do so. Say it again the next week.
What you've fallen for is the idea that someone else will handle it, that it is not your place, and that staying quiet is the same as staying neutral. It is not. I would rather be annoying and sometimes wrong than comfortable and silent while the people around me continue to unjustly pay for it.
I do not know how much longer we have to wait for someone else to do the hard work. All we have is each other.